With My Own Hands
by SilverLocke980
Summary: Tenchi is a man surrounded by women who, in the end, rule his life... and he lets them. But what if, instead of letting them rule because he is that kind of person, he let them rule because he was weak? And what happens when he finally snaps?


1Hello everyone. For those of you who do not know me (read: everyone), I am Silverlocke980, a tale-teller and wordspinner extraordinaire. I'm a huge fan of Anime, and I've always enjoyed the Tenchi Muyo series. But...

I always had problems with it because of Tenchi's wishy-washyness! Now, here me out, before you fans begin pounding me (I"m a fan too, so I'm a friend here, ya?). Tenchi has incredible guts. He really does. He doesn't stay wishy-washy because it's his nature- when he cares about something, he tends to bull ahead and do it, family, friends, and superdimensional space beings notwithstanding. However, he has decided not to intervene with the various women in his life, simply because he doesn't want to hurt anybody and (in my opinion, anyway) he honestly doesn't care enough about the antics of the small army of women about him to really do anything about it. But...

What if it wasn't courage, but weakness, that makes Tenchi do what he does? What if he is not the gutsy, brave hero who is content to let things go their own course I've just described above and he's really somebody who is just too weak to do anything with his life? What if, my friends?...

What if?...

Without further ado, it's...

"SHOWTIME!"

Tenchi Muyo

With My Own Hands

The man staggered around, holding his head in his hands. He weaved drunkenly, slovenly- not all of it was his pain, some of it was the sake he'd stolen from his father, but who cared, shit was always getting stolen in that damn house and _no one gave a damn!_- but a lot of it was simply his pain and his exhaustion, come back to haunt him, now that he was so far in the cavern depths where he'd found Ryoko (and started this whole hell-trip into the land of la la and love, love, what a pain in the ass, love, a horrid thing he'd love to find and choke and strangle- and would, too, if he ever meant the bitch/bastard/fucker. And he'd use the correct gender identifier too, when he met he/she/it, right before he killed he/she/it.) that he couldn't even see the sunlight anymore. He walked into the cave, dragging his steps, feeling almost as though he were dragging some incredibly heavy weight- perhaps a giant wrench, or some ogre's club- with his left hand (the one carrying the small cup of sake he'd just recently finished off- his fourth, no less, my, Tenchi was really going off the wall with this one, his very first drink was just the very first drink of his first drinking _binge_, and boy, his father was going to go nuts when he saw what he'd done- or, wait, no, he probably wouldn't, that was the worst damn thing, his father would probably just smile and say, " It's all right, son, drinking's good for you," and go back to reading his newspaper or something, and Ryoko would applaud him for being more daring and Ayeka would act shocked and Sasami would probably just start setting out sake for him in the morning and Washu would want to test him and Kiyone would complain that drinking was bad for your shooting skills and Mihoshi would probably just break down crying or something and and and he was sick of it!)

Tenchi continued stumbling down the stairs, blind memories and forgotten thoughts filling his brain as he continued to walk down the stairs. He was already near the end of the cavern depths that had housed Ryoko's comatose form when he began his remembering; he was near the end of it when he was finished. Tenchi often wondered what he'd thought in that time, years later, when (as was so often the case) he was alone. He never fully remembered; he just saw a few confused glimpses of the past, Ryo-Oki diving for carrots that had spilled out of his bag as he walked up the steps to the shrine, Ryoko catching him in the shower one morning when she'd first began living with him, a cut on Ayeka's flesh that had bled scarlet and made him think. Sasami in the morning, breakfast on the table, cute little girl smile that always made him grin. Washu, in her lab, sometimes inhuman and brilliantly insane but somehow, always, in the end, human. His grandfather, Yosho, who possessed strength no human could ever match without the aid of technology. His own father, a sometimes funny, happy-go-lucky lech of a man who actually wasn't too bad of a person, sometimes, though a horrible father, always. Walking home by himself, glad for the peace of mind.

Glad, for once, to be at peace.

Tenchi stopped as he realized he'd reached the bottom step. Looking up, he actually growled- low, deep in his throat, a short, almost breathless exclamation of annoyance and disturbance- then charged (well, half-stumbled, really; but it was brutish and perfect for his needs, so in his own, weaving, subordinate way, it was a charge) forth. He stopped as a piercing headache seeped into his mind.

_What am I doing?_ he asked himself. _Charging the air like some sort of blind bear… it's dark down here, where the hell am I?_

The cavern deeps below the entrance to the cave were vast; even Yosho, all those years ago when he placed Ryoko in slumber, had not had time to fully explore them yet. Dark things lived down there, deep things, and even then, when he was one of the most powerful beings in the universe, Yosho had been afraid of those depths. There were things in the darkness a man could not fight with his sword.

Hunger, fear, loneliness, devastation. The feeling that something was always behind you. The idea that there were holes you'd missed, caverns you hadn't checked, and that something was coming up behind you with its mouth wide open and you none the wiser. Such things terrified Yosho, and the swordsman had never bothered to go deeper than the cave in which he'd placed Ryoko's comatose form. And he'd even come up with a name for the caves.

_Illen-Dre-Duroch. _In the Royal Tongue of Jurai, it meant, " Burrows of the Deep."

A special thing about the Royal Tongue of Jurai is that each word has various inflections and ways of being said. In the hidden inflection of that language, the term Barrows had no connotations; but Deep did.

When Yosho said "Deep", he meant "Deep Darkness of the Soul."

Something was down there, and more than just the hairs on the back of his neck had told him so. So for years he stayed away… until one day, Tenchi stumbled on Ryoko while Yosho wasn't paying attention to the cave he had guarded all his life. After that, Yosho had started paying extremely strict attention to the cave- or would have, if not for the constant meetings and interventions that occurred between Tenchi and the women in his life.

So the cave went through a on-again, off-again relationship with Yosho, he guarding it when he could but more often than not found himself too busy trying to keep Ayeka from figuring out who he was to really bother with it that much. Besides, the girls generally kept Tenchi busy, and after Ryoko had come barreling out of that cave, he had always doubted the boy would ever venture down into it. And he thought that, whatever came out of the cave, he, Ryoko, Ayeka, and Tenchi's newly awakened powers (the Lighthawk Wings, most impressive, Yosho would never tell him but sometimes he worried that Tenchi had more power than even he possessed, which would be staggering, to say the least) would be more than enough to take down whatever darkness might decide to lurch out of the cave and assault them.

Unfortunately, that was a mistake.

Sometimes, mistakes can be fatal.

-

Tenchi wandered underground for a few minutes more (the time never seemed to be much in his head, though he did remember vaguely wondering whether the darkness was trying to hug him- somehow, he had a sense of _extreme_ closeness around him, like that feeling you get when someone is standing right behind you and you can almost feel their breath on your neck) and, suddenly, felt sick. Violently, violently sick. He fell down and clutched his stomach. He felt his stomach ache, hurt.

" No!" he cried, before a rush of vomit and gruel poured out of his mouth. Feeling sicker than he'd ever been in his life, Tenchi closed his eyes as a helpless flood of puke flowed out of his mouth onto the ground below. He felt like crying; he _was_ crying. Long days and nights of suffering in silence, of feeling helpless before the storm, of being annoyed and bothered and crapped on and fought over and petted on and pampered on and fed to and others having their way with him without his having any say in the matter struck him in that one long, long moment, when the last thing he'd held sacred, his body (held sacred to him because, no matter how brusque Ryoko was, no matter how rough she got, no matter how many times she appeared, nude, before his naked, showering form, he had never gained an erection from her; no, he had never felt anything for her, and refused to let even the most base and sickening of reactions give away any indication of such a feeling to her), betrayed him, and, in a moment that seemed to sum up all his life in one inglorious, hateful moment, forced him to upchuck the one thing he'd done that had ever been his own complete, total decision.

_I'm weak,_ Tenchi thought, as his eyes remained closed and his mouth remained open, pouring out a flood of vomit into the darkness of the Deep. _I can't even keep down a drink. Hell, I can't even curse- even in my own mind- without feeling like I've done something naughty. Hell. Maybe I should just give it up. Kill myself here. Stay down here until the dark and the cold come and claim me. Then I can sleep. Then I could be fine._

_Probably not,_ part of his mind snickered. _Washu would just find a way to bring you back._

_Yeah,_ he answered himself. _And then Ryoko and Ayeka would fight over me again, and Mihoshi would cry, and Sasami too, then Yosho would come in and say something about honor and father would ignore me and and and…._

_Fuck it!_

Tenchi picked himself up and began looking for his own power. He didn't know quite where it was in him, but he knew it was there- so he searched. He searched and he searched and he searched.

He found it soon enough. The force of the Lighthawk Wings burned about him- filled him, filled the caverns with light. A Baelrog, left there from some forgotten age long ago when an army of humans managed to push it back with a spear that had been forged by a dying man from his dead wife's bones, came to life from its centuries-long slumber, only to die in burning white light as Tenchi's power flared. It screamed only once and then died, flame and darkness falling to pieces all around it. A giant dragon, a creature that had fled into the earth long ago when men invented guns that pierced its hide and seared its brain, looked up from its meal of an Oni in time to flee, heading deep into the darkness under the caves, only to be killed when a second Baelrog, hearing the death cries of the first, came out and attacked it. The Baelrog, intent on scattering the bones of the kin-slaying dragon (as it thought the dragon was; the Baelrog was not one of the brighter members of his demonic race), didn't see the light until it was too late, and was consumed along with the dragon's bones. Everything in those tunnels was consumed as the Lighthawk Wings spread out from Tenchi and consumed the world.

Tenchi stopped. He looked around at the devastation he'd wrought- hundreds of small dead animals, even demons, lost in these caves, the cavern walls destroyed in this area, the world almost busted up. And he thought something.

He thought that he didn't care anymore.

Laughing to himself, a low giggle that got quicker, Tenchi walked out of the caves and into his life.

The last words he muttered as he finally grabbed the reins of change and took control were simple.

" With my own hands I take it."

-

Ryoko's bedroom, Tenchi's house. Ten minutes later.

Ryoko got up the way she always got up, suddenly, quickly, quietly, the way she had learned to get up over years of being a space pirate in the middle of the largest kingdom in the existence of the universe, the kingdom of Jurai. She smiled as she remembered those days. Not exactly the heartless madwoman the authorities claimed her to be (in fact, Ryoko was renowned among the various pirate crews- the _Excelsior_, which had been run by Capt. Madsun, a good friend of hers, in particular- for her mercy, which meant she usually wouldn't kill kids, though everyone else was, to put it mildly, dead meat when they met her), she still _had_ been kind of ruthless, but that was a product more of her choice than anything else; her mother had not implanted cruelty genes in her. In fact (though Ryoko never mentioned it and Washu, arrogant and spoiled scientist that she was, never spoke about it either, about the one time she herself had been completely bested by someone else), the reason she had become a space pirate in the first place was as a way of getting back at her mother. She'd known for some time that Washu was her mom, but when the truth was revealed and her purpose made known (she had been meant to be a supersoldier, a warrior without peer, intended to guard the Royal Princes and Princesses of Jurai- and if that wasn't a joke, Ryoko didn't know what was), she had fled and joined Captain Madsun's crew. That act had changed her entire life.

She'd learned all the pirate lingo, even the small songs they sang when looking for a crew (unique to each captain; Capt. Madsun's song had been " Oh, and a prison camp's/full of love and yet/I have a hankering/for something tall and wet", which was used as a way of telling pirates that not only was Capt. Madsun looking for recruits, but that he was more than willing to pay them in liquor before the mission got started) and eventually became one of the most feared people in the universe- taking her lessons from Madsun and Madsun only (the one person she could trust in the universe; he was the only person she knew who had no connection to her mother, no connection to the great Washu, and so was someone completely beyond her influence to command or control), ignoring her native want to protect others in favor of a forced need to sadistically hurt them, and finally, she got what she wanted- she made them bleed. And her mother had been totally shocked, completely stupefied, that an experiment could go so wrong. Upon reuniting, they'd never spoken about it. That was fine by Ryoko.

It was always depressing to know that you were nothing but an experiment by your genius mother.

Ryoko turned and rolled out of bed and, with but the briefest of yawns, teleported instantly outside. She had a wish to fly into the sky today.

She was the first person to see Tenchi come out of the cave. She smiled and teleported over to the man she loved, and immediately started to speak to him. She was right next to him, and saw nothing different in his posture, though she did notice that his head was hanging low. She'd heard him up drinking earlier in the morning, so she figured she knew what had happened to him.

She smiled. If he needed help getting rid of a hangover, she was probably one of the best women in the universe to turn to. Washu hated alcohol and thought the users of it were weak; Ryoko had determined to prove her wrong on both accounts. As with most areas where Ryoko and Washu fought, Ryoko had finished that battle- with flair, even.

" Hey, Tenchi, why so- urk!"

The shrieking laser Tenchi had fired in the middle of her sentence cut through her stomach and split her wide open. Ryoko fell to the ground, so full of pain that the shock of Tenchi's action hadn't even had time to reach her mind yet. Summoning what power she could, Ryoko tried to heal herself. Tenchi's hand- small, light, brown, tanned from endless days of tending fields, scarred slightly from the few battles he'd had with the monsters of the universe- closed on her throat.

" I'm… not real good at this yet…, " Tenchi said, slowly, and a smile lit his face, and the worst part for Ryoko was, _he looked just like he always did- every time he did something he wasn't quite sure about, or something happened, he had that same look, that same insecure look, the one that made what little of the guardian was still left in Ryoko want to leap up and protect him, guard him, keep him from harm, and now he was looking at her and smiling in that way, and that's because HE WAS NEW TO BEING A KILLER…_

Tenchi concentrated his power and used it like a hammer. Ryoko screamed only once as he clenched his fist and exploded her neck, turning the flesh there into nothing but dust and remnants as he squeezed. Ryoko's face, mouth a wide O of shock, popped off as easily as a dandelion bud that has been squeezed viciously by a small child.

Tenchi began giggling again as he picked up her head. He held the still-dying face up to his own and said, " Heh heh heh... Yo. Looks like... that was... kind of painful. Kind of... messy, too. Guess I'll... have to work on that."

Still giggling, Tenchi began slowly walking towards the house, dropping Ryoko's head as he walked on. It rolled softly in the dirt before stopping, blood slowly leaking out the severed end of its neck.

Tenchi walked on.

-

Washu's lab, Tenchi's house. One second later.

It hit Washu with all the force of a blast. She cringed and groaned out loud- her two shoulder puppets leapt up and asked her what was wrong. Of course, they did not know what was wrong- how could they- Washu had designed them to help in mental work, not scan her biological functions. And even more than that, they could not know the anguish that was ripping her apart right now, simply because they were not part of the bond that Washu had made with Ryoko (made with all her children- she had fifteen and counting, all healthy, all normal- well, there was that one who tried to kill her and was still trying, but hey, that was a separate matter entirely, right?) and so could not even begin to understand the depths of pain to which Washu had succumbed. She scrambled for her throat- it felt like it was being squeezed in half, tight, tight- she couldn't breathe- then it felt like the hand had gotten so tight she had no throat, no airhole left to breathe, and as she started to black out from lack of oxygen, she broke apart the connection before she choked to death on invisible hands. She gasped for air and-

The release was sudden, climatic, orgasmal. Washu drew in a breath- drew it in again. She sighed and, unbidden, smiled. Oh, god. This felt perfect. This was perfect. She drew in another hitching breath, then, wakening back to reality, she realized where she was.

She had been sitting in her chair for a while, working on a research paper, when the attack hit her. In her panic, desperation, and pain, she'd managed to fall out of the chair, strew her papers everywhere, and knock down about half of the objects she'd had accumulated on the desk. One of the shoulder Washu robots was busy cleaning up the mess- the other was busy being dead, Washu having fallen nearly on top of it when she tumbled and breaking its circuits open. Washu shrugged and looked away from the wreckage. She could always rebuild later.

But Ryoko…

Washu shook her head and stood up. In a second's time she had teleported to where her daughter had last been.

The screaming would have continued long after that, but Washu- great Washu, destroyer of thousands by the fact that her weapons were so powerful, healer of thousands because her doctoring technologies were powerful too- passed out upon seeing her dead daughter's form, the daughter she had never really loved and never really told the truth too.

It's odd, really, that Washu would pass out, when she'd stood over a lot of bodies a lot of times and not even twitched a muscle. Odd, really, that this one death should mean so much.

But then again, few of those people had been her friends. And fewer still had been family.

And, in a way, it was less Washu's guilt over Ryoko's death and more her guilt over her birth that made her pass out.

The last thing Washu thought before succumbing to darkness upon seeing Ryoko's headless, still twitching corpse was this:

_My daughter, my poor, poor daughter. I'm so sorry._

_Forgive me…_

Darkness.

-

It was very, very early in the morning that day, when Tenchi began his final descent into darkness. Inside the house, at that time, nothing was disturbed, as Ryoko's scream had not been loud enough to wake anyone up (in fact, it had not been very loud at all- when your windpipe has been crushed to barely the size of a nickel before being crushed so hard that it becomes nothing at all, it is very hard to scream properly) and Washu's teleportation and ensuing black-out made no noise in and of themselves. Henceforth, everyone was totally asleep at that time- except Sasami. Sasami, of course, had gotten up early to cook breakfast for everyone. She was used to waking herself up whenever she wanted to; it was like she didn't really sleep, but just kind of dozed until she decided "Yep, it's time to get up now." A castle guard had once told her that she was the one person in the castle he didn't worry would sleep through an invasion or an attack (some nobles being famous for doing just that); he said that she would probably wake up before it even began happening, her senses were so sharp. She'd laughed and hugged him. The man had been famous for a week. The royal family of a place as powerful as Jurai was considered as almost god-like by the populace, and a guard hugged by the princess was considered something of a celebrity by the greedy, grasping, news-sucking media of the palace, which was constantly aware of every movement of the royal family's life. Sasami had profusely apologized to the man for disturbing his life. After hearing a laughed-off acceptance of the apology and a comment about "it's good for the night life" which she pretended not to understand (she understood perfectly well, though; one doesn't grow up the daughter of a king without learning _something_), she proceeded to thank the man for being so understanding about it all and then proceeded to switch royal guards.

The woman she ended up with was a distant relative of Kiyone's, and it was odd to see Kiyone every day and think of her third cousin, Aliyone. She'd have to ask Kiyone at some time exactly what it was with her family and "one". Sasami thought it sounded pretty; she might have to name one of her daughters with something like that. But then again, a name had to be important to a person, important in the most deep and meaningful of ways; nobles rarely ever saw their children after birth, most of them giving them up to nursemaids or governors or schoolteachers after the almost ritualistic ceremony of childbirth (ritualistic as practiced by Jurai, anyway; scientists ran the whole thing, actually going to the trouble of putting the mother to sleep so she wouldn't interfere with the "process" of childbirth, using machines to dictate which muscles should push and which should relax- they said it made everything easier, but to Sasami, it was just a kind of horrifying way to make the sacred process of childbirth a regulated, custom controlled ritual, just like everything else in Jurai society), and so a name was really all a noble ever ended up giving a child. She knew that, in the Jurai Royal Tongue, _Sasami-Eik-kay-No-Taru _(her full name) meant " A bright new day in Paradise", but she didn't really have any idea what that really meant. Ayeka's name was more clear, but surprisingly morbid: _Ayeka-Ton-Duren-Du-Broch_. Her name meant "March of Bones, Walk of Pain". The inflections clearly indicated Ayeka as the creator of these things. Ayeka never questioned it, just taking it in stride like the princess she was, and Sasami often wondered just what her mother had been thinking, giving her a name like that. It could have started a revolution, if the populace had been more superstitious.

Ryoko's was the worst, however. It was _Ryoko-Lan-Nureni_. It meant, literally, " Bodyguard Number Twenty-One." What a weird name- especially since it had no inflections at all, indicating it as a title of some sort, and not a name. Ryoko had smiled very strangely at her when Sasami asked her about it (she'd heard Ryoko mumbling it in her sleep, during the night; the sound had woken her up), and then said something like, " What do you mean? It's not strange at all... not really..." She'd then left, and from what Sasami could gather, Ryoko had destroyed a big section of forest that day, for no reason anyone could fathom.

People were strange. Sasami hadn't asked about it after that. Or the fact that Ryoko mumbled a lot about "experiments" and "needles" in her sleep. Sometimes sleeping in a house so quiet you could hear a pin drop was bad, especially if you were a light sleeper.

Sasami walked down the stairs and into the kitchen for the last time in her life. She opened the door on her own death and stepped inside. She walked down the hall to the sink and put her hands in, turning it on lowly, so as not to wake anyone.

Behind her, the front door opened, as the now silent and (mostly) composed Tenchi walked into the room.

Sasami half-turned and, seeing it was Tenchi, quietly waved at him. Tenchi looked at her, and his head turned- it was almost like he was looking at her with new eyes. She saw his nostrils flare, as if something had just frightened him badly- then she saw him close his eyes and swallow hardly. Then he looked up and smiled at her.

She shrugged off his weird behavior and went back to work. Behind her, Tenchi walked up with quiet footsteps.

He looked at his hands as if he couldn't really believe this. He couldn't be contemplating her death. He couldn't be thinking about killing her.

Could he?

_You chose this path,_ he told himself. _You chose it. Just as you chose to be a good man, a long time ago. Now, when you were a good man, how did you get anywhere? You got there by faith. You got there by believing in Good. You got there by _trying_. And you know what? You just chose to be a murderer out there with Ryoko just now. Get over it, Tenchi. You're a killer now._

_Remember that._

Remembering it more fully than he might even have realized at the time, Tenchi smiled as he rose his hand into the air and flexed it. Sasami, hearing him moving about behind her and figuring he was merely getting something to drink or being helpful around the house by fixing up the table for her so she could put the meal down on it without any fuss (she was planning on a small, traditional meal today; Tenchi's favorite, actually, she thought, deciding that if he was going to be nice and make the table for her, she could be nice and fix his favorite breakfast meal) ignored him completely and went about washing her hands so she could begin supper. When she heard the small "ching" of the butcher knife being removed from its drawer, she briefly wondered what he was doing, then almost smiled when she decided that he, in misguided non-chef belief, had picked it up to give to her to help her make the meal. Almost turning to speak to him, she decided against it and finished washing her hands. Shaking them off to remove excess water, she prepared to turn around...

The knife that slid in between the bones of her ribcage stopped her long before she could begin the turn. Yet, disbelief heavy in her heart (and confusion; she didn't know _what _this feeling of sudden invasion in her body could be, though she knew that somehow, it hurt without actually feeling hurt, like the edges of her flesh were split and she hadn't had time to feel it yet), she still tried to turn anyway. The carving knife, cutting knife, and fish knife that slammed into her back, one right after the other, settled that issue forever- she never did turn around again. Sasami, bleeding profusely from knife wounds all over her back (not one had struck her heart, though her lungs, liver, and especially her intestines were torn apart), slowly slid down into a slump, only an escaping sigh of air rushing past her lips to freedom as she died.

Blood all over the floor of the room he left, Tenchi stalked out of the room and began heading towards Mihoshi's room.

-

Mihoshi was perfectly asleep when Tenchi went into her room. If Kiyone had been there, Tenchi might have been stopped, for she possessed more than Mihoshi's incredible dumb luck in that she had actual skill- but she had fallen asleep outside yesterday, having made a nice hammock in the forest just to see what such a hammock felt like and having fallen asleep almost immediately upon slipping into it, and so she was not there to guard her friend. Mihoshi slept as Tenchi walked into the room, and her great dumb luck did not save her this time- it only spared her a more painful death.

Tenchi simply took her own gun out of her pocket and blew her brains out. Her face resembled nothing more than a random collection of bones and flesh when he was done.

The noise of the blast woke the whole house up. And Tenchi, laughing and crying at the same time, was fleeing with the gun in his hands. He heard Ayeka with a muffled cry, as well as her two wooden guardians. He heard Kiyone, somewhere far off in the woods, let out a grumbling shout, and almost imagined he could see her drop down into a fighting pose, gun out, body taut as she looked about for an enemy target to shoot. He also imagined he could see his grandfather wake up and look out his bedroom window, and somehow in that moment _know_.

Yosho teleported down, sought to cut Tenchi off. Tenchi fired and fired, and in his madness great skill was given to him- his power flared, and the Lighthawk Wings seared outwards into the dawn of the day. Yosho fell back before its power, not hurt but somewhat stalled- and Tenchi fled.

He fled into the dawn of a new day.

_With my own hands I take it,_ he whispered to himself, as he stretched out his free palm and seemed to catch the very sun in his bloodstained grasp.

He ran, laughing on and on.

-

_I don't need to tell you the rest of the story; you know how that, when everything was said and done, Tenchi managed to steal a spaceship from a visiting dignitary of some foreign world (a place called Andalun) who had always liked Earth's beauty and had been camping out in Japan that week. You know how Tenchi, taking command of a ship that he had no idea how to work, was almost immediately set upon by Washu in Ryo-Ohki, who with tears in her eyes was determined to avenge the daughter she never really knew; how Ayeka, eyes burning bright, summoned her two guardians to open fire on his stolen ship. How Yosho brought out his shining blade and summoned his power to strike Tenchi down. How even Kiyone, still crying over the death of the one true friend the restrained, controlled policewoman had ever really had, tried to slay him with burst after burst of fire and all the weaponry she could throw at him. How Tenchi, laughing, had ordered the frightened crew to get him out of there, and how, with the force of his own Lighthawk Wings, he blew apart one of Ayeka's guardians. How a flying piece from one of her own guardians- sick irony- flew out and removed the princess of one of her legs. How Tenchi flew off into the darkness of space and disappeared._

_I need not mention that, a short time afterward, Ayeka suddenly appeared on her homeworld, riding a cabbit, with an assortment of companions that shocked her father: the traitor and renegade scientist Washu riding with her, the disappearred Yosho at her side, and a distraught, almost haunted-looking woman named Kiyone who wielded a laser pistol and for some reason would speak to no one, not even members of her own party, and indicated all that she wanted to say with subtle gestures and a turn of her wan hands. How the sudden shock of her appearance was even more shocking for the fact that she was missing a leg, and that she demanded that Washu's crimes be ignored. How everyone was surprised at the almost violent change in her, and how her true name began to be whispered as warning of things to come. How she had a new leg implanted where her old one once stood, mechanical, not biological, unlike most new body parts that nobles required; how the shock of the cantankerous, somehow evil-looking metal that was now her right leg caused pampered nobles left and right to throw up and be violently sick and how she had the paint of a warrior added to her face. How she was known as the Lone Princess, after that, how she earned her name and became the true cause of a March of Bones and a Walk of Pain- her own, for she set off into the darkness to train, to hunt, to fight, and did it all for the purpose of becoming powerful, of gaining revenge for her dead sister. How she fought and fought and nearly died, on the road, many times. How her companions did not go with her, for it was a lonesome journey, and one that was better done alone. _

_I need not mention how she came back, years later, with the head of almost every major pirate in the universe in her left hand and a bloodstained naginata in her right. How she spoke of it, when she spoke of it at all, in whispers that spoke of knights and dragons and men that could leap into the sky. How she called in favors, called in favor after favor, and left the kingdom of Jurai nearly penniless but powerful in friends. And, of course, how she set off one day, with Yosho, Kiyone, and Washu in tow, after the man she once called "beloved", an army at their backs, and found him, lord of his own fortress, calling it "_Sasami-Ryoko-Mihoshi-Don-Ken_", or in the High Tongue of Jurai, " The Bodyguard of the Lock of Paradise", for Mihoshi's name had meant Lock in the High Tongue of Jurai, and Tenchi had thought it was funny to give his hellfortress the name of his very first kills._

_Of course, the companions were infuriated- and they charged into the keep and assailed his blackguard army with all the valor of the strong. And soon, in the end, only those four made it to his throneroom, while their army dealt with the bleak things Tenchi had summoned to his aid._

_Tenchi was waiting._

_I won't bother with details; Tenchi had become a monster since she saw him last, a demon if there ever was one, and he slew Yosho in the start of the fight, leaving him to die broken-hearted and bleeding on the ground near his throne. How Kiyone, who had not spoken a word since the day Mihoshi died, screamed only once when he pierced her side, and fired off a laser that seared his eye and blinded him. How Washu, fighting for a daughter she had come to love only in death, fired her last weapon- an experiment she named the "_Tenler-Ta"_, or Final Gift. How she channeled her own life into the weapon, channeled every bit of her genius and her madness and her drops of sorrow, and how the concentrated weapon broke through Tenchi's mind even as it consumed Washu's life. How Washu dropped, lifeless, to the floor, Ryoko's name the last word on her lips. How Tenchi, staggering from the assault, had time to look up, once, only once, before Ayeka's naginata went through his mind and pierced his face. How Tenchi died, torn apart, gasping out his end as Ayeka, tears in her eyes, twisted her lance one more time before dropping it. How Ayeka, taking hold of her last remaining friend, her final companion, set out, staggering as she walked, to greet the great army that had emerged victorious from out of the demon darkness it had willingly been led into. And as she stepped out, she felt tears cover her face for the scientist and the warrior who had died within, for the noble souls who had given their very lives to stop him; and yet she smiled, too, because she felt glad. Her heart was full to bursting; for joy was there, great and heady and strong and sleek, powerful as the wind and stronger than the burning blade, a force more mighty than any that had ever been or ever would be. And Ayeka looked up into the sky and smiled._

_It was over._

_I need not mention these things. They are the business of another time._

_- _Found in the records of Jurai Castle. Believed to be a firsthand account of the reign of the Queen of Bones, as Ayeka was later called, and speaks of the "Dark Time" in her reign when the final battle with Tenchi was waged. Ayeka lived to be many thousands of years old, becoming ancient even among the long-lived people of Jurai. Kiyone eventually recovered and became Ayeka's royal bodyguard. Ayeka gained her nickname mostly from her own full name (which was finally revealed to the public when she came back home- her mother had never let the public know about it when she was young) and the title soon became one of the many venerations that were heaped upon her. Ayeka eventually kept the kingdom together for the entirety of her reign, and soon, the title "Queen (or King, depending) of Bones" began to be regarded as a noble title, and a way of stating that someone was "perfect" in the worlds that belonged to Jurai. Only two rulers have ever had the honor of having "of Bones" added to their title after Ayeka's death: her great-grandson, Oni-Thun ("Wishing Tree"), who was called the "King of Bones" for his exploits in ending the threat of dragons to Jurai once and for all, and Ayeka's great-great-great-great granddaughter, who was called the "Duchess of Bones" for her part in destroying the final cult of necromancers that threatened their realm. The title continues to this day as a honorary title.


End file.
